To endow mobile robots with the ability of navigating in real world, a robust and simple structured light sensory system has been studied.
With this structured light type sensor, fairly accurate range data are obtained, and the data aquisition speed is satisfactory. A mobile robot with this sensor can be applied in two ways: first, real time navigation in 3-dimensional world, second, modeling and recognition of environment.
In the first mode, the geometric information about obstacles is converted to the forbidden area map which contains possible paths of the mobile robot. This operation can be performed in real-time by the projection onto floor method. The selection of path is made by penalty values for each path.
In the second mode, the proposed 3-D line segmenting algorithm approximates, by several lines, the range data from stripe patterns on objects, and store these lines in compact form. If planes exist in stored stripe fragments, the plane parameters and boundary edges can be extracted.
Experiments show effectiveness of the structured light sensor for the mobile robot.
